Are the Ten Commandments the foundation of the Anglo-American legal system?

[Ed Brayton]

A.E. Brownstein wrote:

> This is really a critical part of the issue. Are we talking about 
> distinctly American law or more generic "Anglo-American" law. I have 
> no doubt that the American Tories, the British soldiers who shot down 
> the Minutemen at Lexington, the Hessian mercenaries, and King George 
> III himself all believed in the Ten Commandments as much Washington 
> and the drafters of the Declaration of Independence and the 
> Constitution. If the question is whether belief in the Ten 
> Commandments predisposes you to accept the American experiment in 
> self-government, obviously it did not have that effect on a lot of 
> believers.
>
> Alan Brownstein
> UC Davis


I'm talking about our Constitutional system and the premises upon which 
it operates, not just about specific laws that might have been passed at 
one time or another. Those premises, it seems to me, are not only not 
"based upon" the Ten Commandments, they are entirely incompatible with 
them and antithetical to them. The majority of the Ten Commandments are 
strictly questions of either religious duties that one ostensibly owes 
to God (no graven images, no other gods, taking the Lord's name in vain, 
etc) or they are matters of private morality (coveting thy neighbor's 
property, adultery). Under our Constitutional system, the first kind are 
completely forbidden to be legislated by government, which has no 
authority whatsoever to direct people in the nature, or even the 
existence, of whatever religious duties they may believe are incumbent 
upon them. The second kind are both impossible to enforce (coveting is a 
thought, not an action, and cannot be legislated, nor can fidelity) and 
fall into that sphere of conduct that we generally view as outside the 
realm of government control, drawing on the thoughts of many of the 
founders, Jefferson in particular, who argued that the law exists only 
to protect one person from another. And as noted, the only commandments 
that are consistent with our Constitutional system are found in every 
system of legal thought, including those that have never been influenced 
by the bible at all. Thus it seems incredibly clear to me that the 
argument that our system of laws is "based upon the Ten Commandments" is 
little more than an unsupported assertion that has attained the level of 
cliche`.

Ed Brayton